A Wimbledon tune-up in Michigan? One grass event is starting to grow

“The best thing is watching the players get out on the court and smile while they’re warming up,” Bill Massie says. “They look down, and it’s like they can’t believe the surface they’re playing on.”

What is this magical material that has the power to bring delight even to nervous young tennis players preparing to compete? It’s the sport’s original surface, but one that few of us ever have the chance to trod today: grass. Specifically, perennial rye grass, the type that has been grown and used at Wimbledon since 2001.

For the last four years, it has also been the type that Massie has grown on the 24 grass courts at the Wessen Lawn Tennis Club in Pontiac, Michigan, 25 miles northwest of Detroit. Lawn tennis, on 24 perennial rye courts, in a hardscrabble assembly-line town in Michigan? Is this real life? The unlikely idea was all Massie’s.

An architect by trade, and a net-rusher and doubles specialist on court, Massie (above at left, with Evan Song) fell in love with grass, and the unique sensory experience that comes with playing on it, while watching his son win a junior tournament at the Longwood Cricket Club outside Boston in 2008. At the time, Massie was the head of the architecture department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in suburban Detroit (he now teaches at the College of Design at the University of Kentucky). By 2010, he had constructed his own grass court at home in Michigan; two years later, he decided to build 24 more at an abandoned, century-old waterworks plant in nearby Pontiac that he purchased for $300,000.

For Massie, it was a way to indulge his new passion for grass-court tennis, as well as a way to contribute to the ongoing architectural revitilatization of greater Detroit.

“When I looked at the structure, I thought, ‘This place was made to be a club.’ It was perfect before I even touched it,” Massie says. “It felt like the right place not just for tennis, but for an urban renewal project.”

If renovating the waterworks was in his wheelhouse, laying down perennial rye, and getting it to thrive in a climate unlike London’s, was something entirely new. Massie learned all he could about turf science, and he learned from Longwood that the key to running a grass-court club is to let the surface gets it proper rest.

“We have 24 courts, but this is basically a 12-court club,” Massie says. “We’re constantly rotating which courts we play on, and doing our best to maintain and rehydrate the others.”

While the grass at Wessen didn’t survive the first two Michigan winters, the biggest challenge is high heat and humidity of summer, which leaves the surface vulnerable to stress, and which the All England Club rarely has to face. Wessen suspends play when the temperature reaches 90 degrees. According to Massie, the precautions have paid off.

“I’m constantly blown away by the condition of the courts,” he says. “Our turf management has been way over the top, but it has been worth it.”

This past week, the Wessen courts were subject to their most stressful test yet: a week of professional-level play. Alongside tournament director Randy Walker, Massie held the inaugural edition of the U.S. Grass Court Championships, a $10,000 pro event with men’s singles and doubles draws. The singles winner, 26-year-old American Evan Song, was impressed by what he saw, and played on, in Pontiac.

“It was an incredible opportunity,” says Song, a Las Vegas native who says he had “no experience” with grass. “This is a world-class facility, and very nicely maintained. It’s fantastic.”

For Walker and Massie, the U.S. Grass Courts was “an experiment that came out like a tournament.” Their ultimate goal is to host an ATP 250-level event as part of the lead-up to Wimbledon, and to provide U.S. players with a place to go when their clay seasons end.

“This was a baby step,” Massie says. “It was a huge challenge to manage a tournament with a growing surface, and negotiate the weather. But we learned a lot and we had a huge amount of fun, and I think we helped some young U.S. players get some experience on grass.”

Next year, Massie plans to host the tournament a week earlier, and he and Walker hope to bring a Challenger or Futures event to Wessen in the near future. Massie has also renovated the Olympic-size pool that was on the grounds, and is opening a 24-room lodge on the site to accommodate the players from around the country who have expressed interest in joining the club. He pro-rates membership dues, so that it’s worthwhile for people outside the Detroit area to make the trip a few times a year.

“The hotel should help monetize the tennis,” says Massie, who claims that, so far, it would be “fairly accurate” to say that his club has broken even.

Could Wessen be for tennis what Augusta National is for golf, a club with a nationwide membership? For now, Massie is happy that his courts survived a hard week of play and came out looking, in his words, “pristine.” Just to be able to run around on that pristine rye is reward enough for Massie, a lifelong player who met his wife through tennis.

“There’s nothing like playing on grass; there’s a tactile and visual element that other surfaces don’t have,” says Massie, who maintains a traditional all-white apparel policy at Wessen. “Doubles on grass, the finesse and the detail you use when you’re volleying, is just a joy.”

Some things are, like the rye, perennial. When tennis was invented in England in the 1870s, doubles on grass was its most common format. Whether it’s Massie, or the young players who couldn’t help smiling as they went through their warm ups at the U.S. Grass Courts last week, the joy of playing on the surface never grows old. For past generations of U.S. players, Longwood and Forest Hills were the meccas of grass. It’s not too much of a stretch to think that future generations may find it in Pontiac, Michigan. In tennis, the grass is greener wherever you lay it down.

A LANDMARK DOCUMENTARY DURING THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS EVENT IN SPORTS, CELEBRATING THE UNPARALLELED FEDERER-NADAL RIVALRY AND 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GREATEST MATCH EVER PLAYED.

In association with All England Lawn & Tennis Club, Rock Paper Scissors Entertainment and Amblin Television.  Directed by Andrew Douglas.